blissful nightmares & mechanical dreams

Main Menu

Foetusdreams ‎– Brouillard

The dutch label Winter Light comes out with its first full-length release, composed by the Dutch project Foetusdreams. Beginning with the first song, ‘Way Of Be’, we are given a hint to what this opus stands for: sacral, atheistic dark ambient, as suggested by the recitation ‘There is only one God and that God is man himself”, repeated on the droning fluid of a choral-tinged musical line.

‘Abandoned Planet’ is a cinematic picture of an irremediable future, a play on indefinite and elusive notes, as if covered by the very dust that will whip out everything we now observe in such a careful manner. This same absence of light that the music suggests here will immerse into darkness those who once were saints and murderers alike…

‘Winter Light’ contains even more grave accents and sullen notes, a saturnine sense of despondency, as if this light, diffused somewhere in the distance, could be the only real thing between the worthless earth and a sky that simply does not exist. And those piano chords, so naive and worldly, are written like an irrelevant epitaph on the tombstone that spares you from another daylight.

From here, a place of eternal farewell, the piece ‘Cavern’ ressembles an invitation to a voluptuous meeting within the caves of the earth and what, by an anatomical reading, should represent traces of the earth’s disease; holes and gangrenas in its crust come now to be the only place still safe and pure. In parallel, the following track, ‘Travel Within’, moves more fluidly: blood here and there, coagulated and bubbling, in response to a personal prophilaxy directed to the external world. This return to the womb imprints a suggestive movement to the music’s metabolism and therefore the drones are let loose to encircle the mind in a hypnotic and quite perverse attitude.

Someone said that the dream is the music of the soul. ‘Slowly Approaching A Dead Star’ corresponds to such a dreaming of the impossible. A song built on a catatonic development of dazzling cosmic drones. Out of this dream, from which one should never wake up if they want the dream to really materialize, we are taken to the next song, ‘Brouillard’. Here the sculpture is different, adopting a more industrial style. The pulsating drones reside on flashes of undertones and the musical line is completed by an Amerindian poem interrupted at intervals by a French nihilistic monologue. It should be the album’s pièce de résistance, because it’s simply sublime in its cynical shrewdness of the text, maintained along with that gloomy Dalinian melody, a pure postmodern folk song.

I have avoided giving references, but ‘Interference’ reminded me so much of one of the liturgies from MZ 412’s ‘Infernal Affairs’. The crushing feeling of religiousness and demonic energy, which actually translates in meta-nihilism, pervades this song all along. At the hearing of the escalating drones, the great spaces of hollow matter receive a new personality. On ‘Molecular Cloud’ the Dutch artist seems to paint his drones on the very air around him with gentle brushes, in tones of grey that no soon are dried up, remain imprinted solely on the listener’s mind.

The massive 63-minute long album closes with ‘Endless Horizons’. This journey between vivid drone sculptures has been a passage between the world as one sees it and the world as one feels it, a walk through this multifaceted corridor that we can take only in dreams, or music, or mist.